S01.E02 - Flower Power

Written by Madellaine Paxson and storyboarded by Christelle “Kuri” Abgrall, cover by Galou.

Flower Power is the second episode of season 1, but in reality, it was the first episode of LoliRock ever written and produced. We had to test the core concept of the show in this episode : the princesses living their daily lives, helping people while also performing as a band as much as possible, and fighting Mephisto and Praxina for the Oracle Gems. So this episode could be used as a reference in terms of writing and staging.

Oracle Gems pattern

This story happens just after episode 1, but we can guess that the princesses had a few adventures between episode 1 and episode 2 : Iris knows better how to use her magic, and some Oracle Gems have already been earned. 

However, at this point, both the princesses and villains are looking for the gems as if they’re “hidden” on earth, like jewels. On one side, it reflects how mysterious the Gems are for our characters… but truth is : it was the same for our team ! ;)

We wanted Iris to earn the gems after helping people, but at this time, in the scripts we already had, she just happened to “find” them like some sort of wonderful coïncidence (For instance, in this episode, the gem is just in the pot of the little girl’s orchid).  

For a few episodes, we struggled with this… Should we keep our characters looking for the gem while helping people ? Or simply make it magically appear near Iris after she helped people ?

It’s the later that was chosen :  “Since they’re magic, let’s have them magically be there, at the right time !” And that’s how we dropped the idea of searching the gems like some sort of buried treasure. 

What was funny was to consider that the villains, on their side, would continue searching for the gem the wrong way, and then have to make Mephisto reveal this pattern in episode 17 “Heavy Metal”, as a part of his random stroke of genius (and a way to “fool” the audience by making the villains win too, for once).

Monsters, Magic and Creatures

It was our first time playing with the girls magic, so we tried to explore what we could do with it. We didn’t want our magic to be for fighting purposes only : using magic should be like breathing for the Ephedians, so we wanted daily application, like when Auriana uses it to make her rose-garland move and grow. We wanted magic to be beautiful, and always more powerful when the girls used it together, like with the “Crystalocum Ostendere” spell.

Another big test in the episode was the magical creatures.

On the princesses side, and only for comedy, there was Rosie : the living rosebush enchanted by Iris… It was a test, to see how magical creatures could fit in the concept, but we felt it was too far from our “crystaline” look and feel. Also, our princesses had a lot of entourage : Amaru, Nathaniel, Missy, etc… no need to add one more. So we prefered to leave the magical creatures mostly on Mephisto and Praxina’s side for other episodes, as they were only two.

We knew we wanted Mephisto and Praxina to have one big impressive monster each episode, rather than an army of smaller minions. What we didn’t know was “what type of monster ?” So we tested to have an Ephedian creature, the Snumple, enchanted by Mephisto and Praxina to fight the princesses. 

However, in the end, this idea was more troubling than helping… We already had too many characters and things to tell, and creating new creatures in a “good” and “evil” form, that should be freed at some point, would be too much. We weren’t allowed to have too much fight, and the one in Flower Power pushed it, so we needed to simplify things a little. 

We dropped the “episodic ephedian creature” concept, and instead made Mephisto and Praxina summon a Dark Crystal minion that could be easily and quickly destroyed. 

First storyboard : hard process…

As it was our first storyboard, this episode required a lot of work. More than for any other episode : we had to find the staging we wanted, and also create the reuse shots that you would see in all other episodes : The shot were Iris’ pendant is shining, the summoning of the battle arena, some attacks shots for our princesses, etc… This storyboard, created directly by Christelle “Kuri” Abgrall, the storyboard supervisor, was then used as a reference for all the following episodes. 

It was one of our biggest storyboard, with more than 550 shots in the end. And after the first review, we corrected more than half of it to meet everyone’s expectations. Our biggest lesson was that, as we suspected, we had too many things to tell, and it was hard to mix the different sequences : music (rehearsal/concert), comedy, love triangle (Iris/Nathantiel/Missy), investigation, fighting, magic, etc… 

From this point, we knew that each episode would require a lot of dedication and work to be completed… we were only at the beginning of the journey…